Thursday, July 02, 2009

Honestly, this song sounds like this album cover, and I mean that in a gooder-than-good way:

SAY WHAT YOU LIKE, HATERS, a horse shitting a giant quartz while it’s fanging it out of the ocean is fucking cool.

Seriously: in the past I’ve held the opinion that Decoder Ring maybe depended a little too heavily atmospherics, but on this new record, They Blind The Stars, And The Wild Team, they’ve found the balance. The vibe of spacey wonderment that’s dominated their previous releases is still present, but here it’s supported by serious songwriting chops and a sense of urgency that’s absurdly thrilling. Using clichés like “journey” and “adventure” hurts, but that’s what this feels like: there’s layer upon layer of celestial majesty, tension and release and a throbbing muscularity that brings together three of my favourite rock hyphenates, kraut-, space- and post-. It might be tempting to giggle at the conflation of fantasy imagery in that cover art, but by the time I was one track deep into this album I was “digging” where Decoder Ring are “coming from”.